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Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

Fuck this. I'm a night time person and I feel like I'm constantly punished by a society that places a moral value on waking up early.

In all seriousness, I'm thinking about starting a "night company" for night time people. Come in at 2, work until 10. Is there anybody out there who'd be interested in something like that?

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In the book "Why We Sleep" the author writes about how some people are naturally night owls and it damages their health to be forced into a morning routine (e.g., waking up early for school).

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/style/sleep-problem-late-...

According to Dr. Walker, about 40 percent of the population are morning people, 30 percent are evening people, and the remainder land somewhere in between. “Night owls are not owls by choice,” he writes. “They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hard wiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.”

That book actually put me on the track to taking this idea seriously. I'm absolutely a natural night owl and I felt like my whole life I've been considered lazy by other people because I'm not bright eyed and bushy tailed in the morning, even though I think I have far more productive output that most of my peers - I just do it all in the hours while they're sleeping. Finding out that there's an actual cause besides thinking that I'm just a lazy person was a real revelation for me.

Is it too much to ask for to wake up naturally, exercise a bit, have a solid meal, then get down to business when I'm ready for it rather than having a stressed out mad scramble every single morning?

I'd rather be cautious with such assessments like "absolutely a natural night owl" – at least until we're able to tell that from the genome directly, haha.

I'm a night owl myself, but around 10 years ago I've accidentally switched to the 10pm-5am sleep pattern and those were happiest and most productive months of my life. I was waking up without alarm and was jumping out of bed, quite literally. I dream to return to that pattern again and have been trying to do so since then (no luck so far).

Studies have identified genetic markers associated with self-reported "morningness" near genes known to affect circadian rhythm.

And daylight savings only makes this worse.

I'm neither. I just need 6-9 hours of sleep regularly (going to bed at the same time). It takes 3 to 4 days to adjust to an other schedule (with difficulties during that period). So going out on weekends means I can't wake up early during week days.

Yes, but they're all single or otherwise have no family obligations. Once you have a family and have to deal with school and other activities it's pretty hard to deviate much from the normal 9-5 workday.

No that's bogus. I have three kids and am very much a night person.

Usually in bed around 2.

Are you responsible for getting your kids to school? The average US school day starts at 8 AM.

In my country kids use their foot to get to the school, even small kids (usually starting at 9 years when afterschool care is not available anymore). Maybe you should start structuring your society in a way that allows people without cars to get around if you don't like that, or move to Europe.

Wow, I don't know if the negativity is warranted here, but for me (and my kids walk to school), getting the kids ready involves making sure the young kids get properly dressed, breakfasted, lunch packed, etc... Transportation is not always the issue.

I didn't want to be negative, sorry. Kids generally are able to do all of what you saod when they're 9 years old. I've seen that American families often belittle their kids and are afraid to make them responsible.

Your mileage may vary. I grew up In New York City and was fine getting myself ready and taking an hour on public transport to school every day, but New York is an outlier amongst US cities. Even my friends who grew up in the suburbs just outside New York needed their parents to be chauffeurs and butlers for them.

Not just the US, UK is the same, when I was 9 (1989) I had to cross two busy roads to get to school and it was considered entirely normal to walk to school alone.

Now in 2019 at the same age (9) letting my step-son do the same would be considered by a lot of parents to be borderline child abuse.

I’m treating him the same way my parents treat me, if he wants to make his mum a cup of tea (novelty hasn’t worn off) I’ll let him (with supervision at a distance), I’m not coddling him at his age I had full access to my father and grandfather sheds/garages and tools - by comparison a kettle isn’t a big deal.

In New Zealand this is illegal while they’re under 14.

Whereas, when I grew up, pretty much from 7+ you were expected to be able to go visit your friends, get to school, etc. without all the ceremony and scheduling required today.

Yep, it's hard to avoid the "back in my day" feel but there is a qualitative difference in how we are raising current generations here, Daniel is vastly less self-sufficient than I was at the same age.

Yes. Kids 1 needs to be on the bus at 722 for the other two at 830.

So you aren't really a night person, you just don't sleep very much.

No, I'm a night person alright, but my choice to be a member of society in good standing forces me to not sleep very much.

That's the problem.

What happens if you try going to bed at 11pm?

Depends on the day. Most times I try I'll lay there tossing around or staring at the window for a few hours.

For me, the "night owl" manifests as clarity of mind. My mind feels clearer as the day progresses and clearest during the evenings. If I try waking up at 6:00 AM or something early like that, I'm foggy all day until ~10 PM when I should be getting to sleep, then I'm exhausted with a clarity I hadn't had all day so I don't even want to sleep, I want to do something.

It's like, when the sun is down, my brain is ready to be super productive.

Does your spouse take charge for the kids' morning and night routines?

Do you feel you spend quality play time with your kids as they grow up?

Do you feel you get enough time to be intimate with your partner?

Here's the problem with your questions. I could answer in whatever way suits my argument and you'd have no real response. You want me to give input to your hypotheses, but I'm not going to play that game.

So instead of answering these, because your list of tasks that imply my life is deficient by your standard could go on forever, it makes more sense for you to argue whatever position you are taking directly.

as a family obligated person, i think there is a demand. And i think it could help parents, one parent could work early or half a day, then come home take over child care, and then the other parent can do a full 2 - 10, 8 hour day without the need for day care or some.

i know people that dont do the math, and actually work to pay for the daycare...

That schedule might work for "parenting" but would be horrible for the relationship of the couple. People often try to view parenting solutions in isolation and forget that this is the lives of 3+ people we're discussing. It's the same as work to pay for daycare. If a stay at home parent works 2-3 days per week, and their income only covers the expenses of going to work, they still get benefits. They stay in the job market without a multi-year break, in my country they accrue superannuation payments, and it gets them out of the house with a break from the kids (parenting constantly is hard mentally).

I don't think you can say with any level of certainty that such a schedule would be horrible for a couple's relationship in general, or as a rule. Relationships are all very different, as are the people involved in them. I'd bet plenty of couples would find flexible work hours to have a number of helpful, positive side effects on their parenting and their relationships.

Are you a parent? I am, and every parent I've ever spoken to has said how difficult maintaining a relationship with your partner is when you have young children. If you make it so that your schedule means you never see each other than this will be even worse. The trope of a parent to young children is a tired, worn out, exhausted person and the above schedule is going to give these parents even less time together and virtually zero support while parenting.

Yes, I am a parent.

> I know people that dont do the math, and actually work to pay for the daycare

One parent staying home to avoid paying for daycare will generally permenantly depress that person’a income, long after the kids no longer need daycare. Even if you’re just breaking even on working with paying for daycare, you’ll make more money in the long run after you stop paying for daycare.

Single dad, night-person here—I far prefer working at night once the kids are in bed over trying to squeeze meaningful productivity in between school hours, dinner, activities, father-son time, etc. I've trained myself to do something from 9-4, as those are my remaining school-age son's school hours, but it's nowhere near as satisfying as working at night when the world is asleep.

All of those articles are a) single or b) rich or c) young people with no families (and combinations of those) signaling how motivated and what hard workers they're in...

There's also a reason why we see them from privileged (usually white) people in cushy careers (or in pursuit of such), and we don't e.g. read a black single mother, walking up at a 5am everyday and working her ass off two jobs till late, just to make ends meet blogging such BS...

Broke people with no job or shift work also do the 2-10 thing.

Yeah, but they don't post what winners they are for doing so, and how it changed their productivity...

Kid #2, who still won’t sleep through the night at 6 months, pushed me into the get to bed at 10/wake up at 5:30 routine, because that’s his routine.

We home school and all get to bed at 2am and get up around 10am :)

That might sound nice until you realize that most people socialize after they get out of work. If you have a weekly schedule like this you might miss out on a lot of social opportunities, much like people who work in the restaurant industry or have odd shifts in jobs like nursing.

I've had the inverse problem as a morning person, where all the interesting social/cultural activities require staying up hours past my bedtime.

By far, the most popular time slot for the activities I want to participate in is 7-9pm, and usually Tuesday and Thursday. Monday is much less common, Wednesday is very rare, and nobody ever wants to schedule an activity on Friday. Occasionally something will start at 6pm, if they need an extra hour.

So every week, I'm forced to choose among activities, as my Tuesday/Thursday 7-9pm are always at least double-booked, and usually triple- or quadruple-booked. I have more than enough free hours in the week to do everything I want to do. It's just that hardly anybody ever wants to schedule anything at any other time.

You're going to have a chicken-and-egg problem getting any number of people to shift away from this schedule.

In my own life this hasn't been much of an issue. I wake around 5pm, so if there are evening plans, that tends to be my morning plans. Of course, this means I end up having a fancy dinner with friends for breakfast at times, but that's not all that big of a deal. And if I plan to work that day, I won't drink at "dinner".

All in all, my social life is pretty normal with my night schedule. I wake up around the time my wife gets home from work. We eat together and talk and hang out. When she goes to bed, I go to work. By morning, as the rest of the world around me is waking up, I handle any errands or chores and I'm back to sleep by somewhere between 9 and 11am.

The only time my schedule ends up being an issue is when we travel. But then since I'm not working, I actually really enjoy being up during the day. It's just difficult to switch schedules from "night mode" to "day mode" and back after our travels are over. It's pretty much the same thing as jet lag when flying half way around the world. It's a pain in the ass for a couple days, but not particularly detrimental.

I've brought this up before, but worth repeating: According to the book Why We Sleep, something like 30% of the population are hard-wired to be "night owls" and 30 or 40% early risers.

The author hypothesized that this may be an evolutionary survival mechanism that allowed bands of humans to always have people who were awake or more likely to wake quickly if threatened after dark or in the early morning.

For the natural night owls (I am one) the power of a slow morning is just the way we roll. I am so much more productive at 9pm than 9am, and have reworked my daily schedule accordingly.

Yes, it's hard with kids but basically have adopted a bifurcated sleep pattern - 6 hours, wake at 6:15 am, and help with family stuff and do about an hour of non-brain intensive work, and then two more hours of sleep before rewaking and restarting work in the late morning, raring to go. In the evening I can get so much done.

I have my own company, so this flexibility is possible.

The "slow morning" thing is real. No matter what, my brain does not turn on till close to lunch time. Being a morning person would make life easier in a lot of ways, but it just isn't how I'm wired.

I would sign up in a heartbeat, even if it's a plain old web programming consultancy. I've done all this shit for thirty years, and still I eat speed every morning and feel like a sleeping person with a rocket strapped to my back until noon. I go backpacking with no electricity for a month, stay up till three in the dark, wake up at noon in the daylight, and feel wonderful. I am sick of sanctimonious authoritarians telling me I just need to change my perspective in order to be normal.

If I were single and straight out of college I would have jumped for something like that...for a little while until sleeping when the sun is out became untenable.

I’m with you. I am very much a night owl. I do my best work between noon and 9pm. Fortunately, my work can be done any time of day. In fact, projects I manage are “jobs in addition to” for most team members. Which means they work on my stuff later in the day, after their day jobs.

I’ll start getting notifications of task completion early afternoon, continuing into the night. I have to process each task, accepting or rejecting them by morning, to keep forward momentum through the next day. Lots of harmony between my internal clock and the work I do.

There’s just one problem: most companies require me to be in the office from 8am to 5pm every weekday. The constant clash of “my job” (the rigid traditional workday), and “my work” (highly-structured, but very fluid schedules), causes a whole lot of unnecessary stress and unproductive office time. I end up working unsustainably long work-weeks, all due to optics (read: office politics). It’s all very strange to me.

My current solution is to work as an independent contractor, and be my own boss. But this solution comes with a whole other set of (very difficult) problems.

It’s frustrating to never fit into the structure of a company, considering I like my work, I’m good at it, and it fits into my internal clock.

Amen.

Yes, I (and I think many others) would be VERY interested in companies that allow this kind of schedule. Further more, I think you'd find that hiring people who want to work those hours, means you're hiring people who are most successful in those hours.

Nothing sucks more than being a night person, whos brain comes online later in the day, but having to be in your seat at your desk at 9 AM.

I don't see where TFA ever said that you /should/ become an "annoyingly productive early morning person". It only talks about how to go about doing that, /if that is what you want to do/. If that's not your thing, then that's fine, and I'm not sure why you'd even bother reading it (or perhaps you didn't).

I like the sentiment, but companies formed for any reason other than solving a customer problem and earning money tend to do poorly.

Haha, of course. "We're awake at night" would not be the point of the company, just an aspect of the culture. It'd probably have to be adjacent to other "night" industries though, or something with a good tolerance for asynchronousness, or have clients in appropriate timezones.

The original motto of the Pinkerton Detective Agency was "We Never Sleep".

They should be forced by law to accommodate that, then, so that there is no advantage in not doing it. Like they can't use child labor anymore.

Not a natural early bird, but I picked up the habit of getting up early because its a great way to get uninterupted time at work (without meetings, fairly silent work environment with almost all desks empty).

Now I get strange looks when I leave at 3pm.

My employer let's us punch the time clock (we can do it online, too, which means it works with home office). I think you could run a noon to 8pm schedule (being in the office after that needs to be registered with facility management).

PS: My personal (N=1) experience with being a night owl actually is, that I have no problem getting up early when I go to bed early enough. Setting my alarm clock to 9:30pm as a reminder to go to bed helps me a lot getting up early. I don't buy too much into this theory of a night-owl / early bird split in the population, because time is kind of a construct of a watchmaking civilisation. I'd assume sunrise and sunset are much bigger influences on individual's behaviour.

Yea I'm with you here.

The world definitely favors the naturally early riser - and if you're not you're seen as lazy or eccentric.

I run my own LLC, and my own working hours are 2PM (-ish) to 2AM (I get up at 10:30-11AM). Don't get frightened, I don't continuously work for these 12 hours, there's between 6 and 9 hours of working time in there, which I know because I track how much time I spend and on what. This works great for me. If I get up early and start working, my whole day will be ruined and nothing of value will be done. Tested many times. If I get up early and don't start working until my normal working hours, I _might_ be able to get something done that day. I'm very protective of my schedule, and have a very understanding wife (who appreciates not having to work).

Sounds perfect. Can I ask what you do?

Currently? Bootstrapping a product in computer vision space, by spending half the time helping 2 other companies with their deep learning efforts, and the other half on my own R&D. I've been in the fortunate situation that there's far more consulting work than I'm willing to take (and man do I charge a lot), so that part is booked months in advance. Product efforts are progressing nicely, too. I might be looking into hiring someone to help on both of those things in the foreseeable future.

I don't know if it's just the network effects or my preconceived notions, but the whole "business" thing turned out to be not as hard as I thought. I work out of my man cave and have a rack full of quad-GPU machines in the garage (because fuck cloud GPU pricing). I spend about a day and a half per week in my customers' offices (and I charge my hourly rate for commute too). Everything else, I don't even have to leave the house. If I don't feel like working on any given day, I just don't. Today is one of those days.

I now think this is how high-skill CS is supposed to work. Offices are bullshit. You can get easily twice as much done with a little self-discipline if you work remotely, and work will be of higher quality, because you _can actually focus_.

It’s easy because your are in a high demand field that requires skill.

As someone who was around for the first dot com boom you (if you aren’t) should be banking cash/paying down debt as much as possible.

When I contracted on a (after all taxes etc), one for me, one for future me basis and it paid off.

That said it’s a nice problem to have :)

I don't have any debt, and I don't really have to work anymore. Short of a nuclear holocaust, I'll be fine.

I would. I struggled for a long time as well, then my wife told me to stop and follow my natural schedule. I am way more productive now. They only reason it worked though is that we own our company together.

This is one of the primary reasons I've been a remote worker for the vast majority of my working life. I prefer working nights, to the point when I almost can't be truly productive during the day.

I think having and sticking to a routine is far more important than the actual routine.

Night-owl, morning person, who cares? As long as you stick to something.

With that said- I rise at 5am everyday.

Yes, I agree. I love my routine and it makes me happy.

Early riser here, and like some of the night owls here, I also miss out on things. Concerts that go late are hell for me. I’ve adjusted to only seeing the ones I really care about and being fine with not catching the others.

Given the 24/7 nature of the net these days, I’m surprised companies aren’t running an early bird office on the east coast and a night owl office on the west.

A lot of folks in India who work on US/Europe based assignments tend to work to a similar schedule. Most of them did not seem particularly happy after a while on the schedule. Partly, its missing out on a lot of socializing that tends to happen in the evenings, and partly it is missing out on the morning schmoozing at the coffee machine where are a lot of information exchanges hands and decisions are worked out.

This is one of the funniest comments I've seen in HN. That said, I think your company idea is pretty interesting.

I’d love that.

When I freelanced, I used to start about 9 in the evening, work through with no distractions till 4 or 5 and sleep until lunchtime. It was great as I had time to do stuff or laze about in the afternoon, see people in the evening and still do a full ‘day’ of work.

Only backfired when a client insisted on a 9am meeting.

I'll happily join :)

With me it comes and goes. I have nocturnal periods, mostly when I'm working on some project and 'normal' periods when doing a lot of customer work. But as soon as I'm on my own the night habit kicks in. I just love it when the whole world is quiet.

Same here. There's nothing quite as satisfying as everyone else being asleep and away from work, leaving me alone to focus on whatever I'm doing.

Work on a remote team that's spread across the world that knows how to work in an async fashion that isn't always chasing "they wanted it yesterday!" deadlines. There's much less expectation to be available at specific times.

Where I live, we have sunlight from 6 in the morning till 7:30, even 8 in the evening during summers.

I see no reason whatsoever to pursue a 9 to 5 routine. I come in to work at 12 leave by 8-9 and I'm pretty happy for it

You're also in a society that focuses on getting things done. How about not getting things done and staying up late. Let's see if that article gets to the top of HN.

One of the main advantages of the morning is that most people haven't gotten up yet and the phone hasn't rung yet. You'd lose that. :-)

That doesn't beat working late at night, where you have much more time without such distractions than just a 2 hour window.

I work at a place where we are free to do that. I have spent a few months working 4-12. I can't say I loved it, despite not being a morning person.

Perhaps you could work remotely for a company in a different timezone.

Or just work remotely period, so people don't notice what time you start your day.

You're punished how? by bars being open when you get off work? or shows happening after work? or "working late" or "burning the midnight oil" being considered a sign of dedication and hard work? by all the stereotypes of old people waking up to watch the sun rise?

early to rise has some cultural cachet as moral but when have Cool and Moral ever coincided?

Banking and the DMV are pretty much it as far as things-denied-the-night-owl.

plus 8-5? that shit aint early. Talk to some bakers or retail works about waking up early.

The thing about "burning the midnight oil" is you have to be there before everyone else too, otherwise you're just "catching up"

Isn't most tech companies like that? People get punished for being come-early-leave-early and rewarded for working late.

I think “fuck this” is the only correct answer to any of these narcissistic lifehacker-pr0n blog posts.

2 until 10? When you said night person I thought more like you start your day at 7-8PM.

I picture 1PM-6PM followed by 10PM-3AM for someone pulling 10 hour days at a startup.

10 hours a day seemed like a lot to me at first but I would totally work on that schedule

Even better if it's possible. But in business, you really do end up needing to interface with people in normal 9-5 companies fairly often, so at least with 2-10 there's some overlap in the afternoon. Do external stuff in the afternoon and then just grind through the night.

OP did not specify AM/PM.

When everyone else is asleep it feels like i have all the time in the world.

Oh give me a break. If you don't care so much, don't care. No one is shaming you. This is not for you. Get over yourself.

This is for people that think like the author and want to do like the author. Everyone else can ignore.

The biggest difference between you and the author is that the author did not say anything pejorative about those who do things differently.

The parent didn't say anything pejorative about those who do things differently. They said "fuck this", and lamented feeling punished by social pressure to be a morning person.

Saying "fuck this" about a submission is pejorative, as opposed to saying "I disagree with this."

It also conveys a nuance and adds a spark to the response that "I disagree with this" doesn't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beV0N7lItuQ

I don't think they even said they disagreed. They said it wasn't for them.

You said the pejorative statement was about those who do things differently. Saying "fuck this" makes it clear there's a strong objection to the idea(s) presented in the article, something "i disagree" just wouldn't convey in the slightest. Saying "fuck this morning person" would have been the statement your critique would fit.

I am saying "fuck this" to the culture that pressures everybody to be productive in the early morning and casts judgement on those who have trouble being productive in those hours. No offense was meant to the author, I'm always interested in people sharing their routine advice.

I think people took your 2 to 10 thing far to literal.

A remote first workplace gets the same flexibility you desire (pick your own hours) without any of the drawbacks or relationship problems (it's actually better than the current situation of 9-5 + commute.)

There are consessions with all that but you can work around them as others do already.

Regarding societal pressure, there is. But you need to realise these people are productive, not always successful in hindsight.

There was some article a whole back about how the most influential people in history shave all had one sleep thing in common: sleep was consistent day to day. None of them had any similarity in the hours they kept.

My guess is half the people out there are night owls and the modern serfdom left them no choice but to comply. Just look at the people yawning in a long Starbucks line.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/having-this-gene-...

I'll come to work there. The night is so peaceful and there are fewer distractions from the news or social media

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